What
do the British Official Historians Say about Codebreaking
Evidence of Gas Chambers in Nazi Camps?

BRITISH

INTELLIGENCE

IN THE

SECOND WORLD

WAR

Its Influence on Strategy

and Operations

VOLUME TWO

by

F. H. HINSLEY

President of St John's College and

Professor of the History of International Relations

in the University of Cambridge

with

E. E. THOMAS

C. F. G. RANSOM

R. C. KNIGHT

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

The
German Police Cyphers

Page
673

Between 17
and 25 May 1943, following the breaching of the Möhne
dam, a special but readable cypher was used in the Ruhr. It
carried orders to police and other organisations in the
affected areas; the decrypts showed that the emergency was
quickly controlled

From the
spring of 1942 until February 1943, when it ceased to be
sent by WIT, GC and CS decrypted in another cypher a daily
return of prisoners at Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and
seven other concentration camps - not all of them, but a
good cross section.* The daily return consisted of a series
of unheaded, unexplained columns of figures which GC and CS
worked out to mean (a) number of inmates at the start of the
previous day, (b) new arrivals, (c) departures by any means,
and (d) number at the end of the previous day. It also
specified the various categories of prisoner, such as
politicals, Jews, Poles, other Europeans and Russians. GC
and CS interpreted column (c) - 'departures by any means' -
as being accounted for primarily by deaths. The returns from
Auschwitz, the largest of the camps with 20,000 prisoners,
mentioned illness as the main cause of death but included
references to shootings and hangings. There
were no references in the decrypts to
gassing.
There were to be other references to concentration camps in
the police traffic of later years, but they were
infrequent.**